An analog telephone adapter (ATA) provides an interface that allows you to use a standard telephone to communicate over an IP network such as the Internet. The name "analog telephone adapter" was originated by Cisco for their adaptor and other manufacturers may use slightly different acronyms, but essentially they mean the same thing.

There are various basic selection strategies to choose the best VoIP service provider tailored to your needs.

Conventionally, the mention of the words ‘PBX phone systems’ brings about an image of expensive equipment, miles of entangled wires, and complex connections. For a large corporation having large number of employees, managing the PBX system requires lot of expertise. A company has to maintain dedicated staff for these specific tasks. Additionally, the system has to be updated periodically to meet the ever increasing needs of the growing company. A company can avoid this constant upgrades and maintenance tasks by switching over to a hosted PBX system.

IP stands for Internet protocol. IP Phones allow the user to speak over IP networks such as the Internet or a company intranet. Other common terms for IP Phones could be VoIP Phone, Internet Phone, Web Phone etc.

You're at an internet café or at the airport and get an important business call--on your laptop. You're on the road and receive an urgent voice mail--in your e-mail inbox. Your business has a phone number with a New York area code--even though your office is in Texas.

Welcome to the world of VoIP. With a VoIP service, your phone calls travel over the internet as data, just as e-mail does. This type of service can dramatically lower your phone costs while increasing your productivity. It also provides a range useful features and capabilities that conventional phone technology just cannot offer.

Obviously, the minimum requirement to use VoIP is a connection to the internet. If your connection to the internet is through a standard dial-up modem, you will also need a computer to access the internet. Keep in mind that a dial-up connection, can only provide a maximum of 56 Kbps in bandwidth, which limits the quality of VoIP services.

For the best call clarity, the minimum speed for VoIP phone calls is between 90 kbps (kilobits per second) to 156 kbps at the other end of the VoIP speed spectrum.

Generally speaking, the higher your upload speed (which is really what is meant by your Internet connection speed), the more reliably consistent the quality of your VoIP phone calls will be. Typically, only a broadband Internet connection can provide the minimum bandwidth for VoIP calls.

There are several advantages using Voice over IP (VoIP), including the availability of advanced features that standard telephone systems are not capable of and the ability to have a phone number usually associated with a particular local area anywhere in the world.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a technology that allows voice traffic to be transmitted over a data network, such as the public internet. Using VoIP and, usually in conjunction with a broadband internet connection (cable modem or DSL), it is possible to use a wide range of equipment to make telephone calls over the net.

Check out a brief overview of the the most important VoIP and internet telephony related definitions, terms and acronyms.